| According to schema theory, schema can enhance the learners’ reading ability in that it can make it easier for the information to be selected, noticed and memorized. Meanwhile, studies of psychological linguistics have revealed that there are a large number of prefabricated language units stored in human being’s memory. These units are the prefabricated chunks which consist of several lexical items that bear more information than an individual word does. Therefore, from a theoretical point of view, attaching importance to mastery of lexical chunks can contribute to the idiomaticity, accuracy and fluency use of language.Lexical approach is the teaching method which employs lexical chunks as the basic language units. In recent years, more and more teachers apply lexical approach to practical English teaching. However, so far, most of the studies have been confined to theoretical level such as the definition and classification of lexical chunks, without concerning about the effective ways of memorizing and retrieving them. Therefore, on the basis of previous study, schema theory was employed in this thesis to bring the lexical approach into full use in junior middle school English reading teaching, which contributes to the improvement of students’ reading competence.To validate the effects of schema theory on the lexical approach, an experiment was carried on the students from two classes of Grade Nine in No.4 Middle School of Baojing County. Before the experiment, there was no significant difference between the two classes in terms of English proficiency. Class One and Class Two were designed as the control class and the experimental class respectively. However, the former was instructed by the lexical approach alone but the latter by the schema-theory-based lexical approach. Some experimental instruments were employed in the experiment, such as questionnaires, pretest, posttest and so on. In addition, SPSS 19.0 was used to analyze the data.According to the data analysis, the results indicate that the experimental class performed better than the control class(t=-3.355, P=0.01<0.05), though both had got improved. The significant difference between the two groups shows that the schema-theory-based lexical approach can enhance the students’ English reading ability than lexical approach alone. Therefore, it is suggested that the method should be widely used in the English reading teaching. |
